On being a webmistress

by Celeste Stokely, Stokely Consulting

The joy:
I'm the webmistress of www.stokely.com,
and 90% of the time, it's
a wonderful job. (In Stokely Consulting, I'm also a consultant, a CFO,
and a business co-owner, but that's a different story.)

Our readers send me wonderful thank-you notes, URIs of useful
information, and corrections to our site. They sometimes tell me how
I saved their job/hair/life/marriage/sanity by providing the information they
need, and that makes it all worthwhile for me. Some even send cookies or
autographed pictures of their sysadm team, and
that's always nice (especially when I fix their modem problems over the
phone for free).

The pain: But then, there is the other 10% of the job.
Sheesh, what a pain! I get to deal with broken links, down
servers, slow servers, bad referral links, DNS gone nuts in foreign lands,
public servers that require authentication (hello? want my
business?), vendors who try to buy our recommended
icon for their listing (they can't),
and readers who think I'm vendor tech support just because I have
a link to the vendor's site.

And, let's talk about broken links, okay? I have spent a lot of
time getting the URI to point to the specific place in a vendor's site with
the specific information a Unix Sysadm needs. And then, the vendor
reorganizes the site. Then they do it again. Then, their search engine
returns only Spanish/German/Japanese pages so I can never find the
information again.

Or, some idiot decides to implement the site in frames, so I can
never hope to access the useful info-bit directly, ever
again. From here on, I'll add links only to the site's main page. I'm sick
and tired of rummaging through quickly-changing sites. Feh.

I get the pain of corporate mergers. www.foo.com gets bought by
www.bar.com and becomes www.baz.com. Do they ever tell me? Nooooo.....
I'm supposed to be merger-clairvoyant. I also get the sorrows of corporate
extinction, those web sites of companies who have met the 404 of doom in that
big bankruptcy court in the sky.

Now, let's talk about Web Administration tools. In The Beginning, all
you needed were simple command-line tools written in Perl to check your
links and your HTML. Simple bit-editors were good enough for graphics.
Good search engines were free. The best web servers were free, too.

Well, the best web server is still free. (Thank you, Apache!) But, the
free html-checkers aren't staying current with all the HTML revisions, the
browser folks add all their own "standards" and I will stay fully
open-systems compliant, free link-checkers are slow
and unwieldy, search engines have to be expensive to be good or else your
ISP doesn't support them (we hotel our site, not run our own web server),
and our simple graphics look crude compared to today's snazzy standards.

Have you priced commercial Web tools lately? They're $250-$1000 a pop,
and usually run just on Microsoft platforms. I've bitten the bullet
and bought a few, but I still use vi and make to edit the site. Hey, I have
a very tiny budget for Web site maintenance. I love free tools.

So, I'll hang tough and remain a webmistress. I'll try to produce the
best web site possible for someone without a $10,000/year and 40 hour/week
web site budget. Thank heavens for
the wonderful folks who drop by our site (about 5000/day of you!) and
a special thanks to those who say thank you or give me good URIs to add.
I do this to make the world safer and saner for Unix System
Administrators, folks
who have one of the toughest and most wonderful jobs in the world.

Thanks for being one of our loyal readers, and thanks for letting me
blow off this steam. I'm feeling better now, Dave. :-)